From there to here
by lolly2222
Summary: I originally wrote a one shot about a possible scenario that made R.J. who he was. The idea of the defining moments that made the team who they were too stayed with me so I decided to add to it, including one for each team member.
1. The making of a monster

**Authors Note: So real life has been **_**meh**_** of late and I have been unable to write, I kind of started with something then ended with this. I don't know what to say really, I just get in a mood and channel a serial killer. That's probably not very healthy but hey better than nothing!**

**Disclaimer: Its Bruno's child, I'm just babysitting!**

He watched the child, a slip of a boy running through the park, throwing away his smiles and glee as if he has an endless supply. His beaming mother watches him as he plays, enraptured by him. He looked like that once, he was him before...

It is funny how children believe in magic, like really, truly, faithfully believe. In some ways it's true they do possess that spark of potential inside them, that overflow of endless possibilities, the stars are within their grasp. Not to mention in a world owned by adults they are almost invisible, ignored for the most part, merely shooed away like animals when they get underfoot. But being unseen is a powerful gift.

Sure at the time it seems like a curse, resulting in an almost constant desperate plea for attention, but if you can hold onto that invisible cloak and wrap yourself in it, through the teens and beyond, then the world is no longer theirs, instead you can own it and own all those in it.

He watches them interact, unnoticed of course and thinks back further to what was.

You often hear philosophers and drunks ruminate on the idea that what we become is due to the sum of our experiences. Life and death are a given, the  
beginning and end merely two major points on the journey through the circle of life, but what happens in between is the crux, essentially the everything that makes us and makes us great.

He learned too young that it's all bullshit; every lifetime is so futile, just a constant nightmare filled with weakness and pain. A bitter roller coaster, that even while you ascend, you know as soon as you hit the top you will quickly descend back into anguish and heart wrenching desolation.

Life keeps knocking you down until you can no longer get up, all the while aided by gravity, leaving you shoved and pulled, inescapably trapped so the only thing you can do is lie there and take it.

Sometimes it's so tempting to run away, simply ignore it all, hiding from the winged creatures snapping at your heels. Hope is the idea that if you try really hard, you can escape the demons that follow you. Sure some of them are of your own making but most... most are out of your control. There is no escape in truth, bar the inevitable, final one.

It's nice to place the blame at the metaphorical feet of a benevolent God, but really who has the time to crush the faith and dreams of such insignificant creatures.

If there is a God then maybe anguish isn't his creation.

Good and evil, ying and yang, the balance of it all. Perhaps its all the devils sick little joke, God gave us the capacity for love then the devil made germs, viruses and tiny little cells that mutate and eat us up from the inside out, just to balance it out and take it away.

No, we can't have a good life, nor a happy life, evil reins supreme. War, fanatical zealots, murderers; sure they get the brunt of the accolade but its those tiny little diseases they kill the most, they are what destroy lives and create the most fear. A minute ticking time bomb, unseen within yourself, just waiting to explode.

They say the greatest trick the devil ever did was making everyone believe he didn't exist, but they were wrong, his best manoeuvre was to force people to watch those they love die, to suffer by proxy, the shadow this event creates covers a person throughout their existence, tainting every day.

In the course of a single death, like a stone in a pond, a ripple rips through the calm of many lives. The sinking stone lays to rest in the earthen bed, its journey over and completed, but its final act flows outward.

Sure each ripple is less powerful but its scope grows with each wave. Starting in the centre, powerful tsunamis for all those involved, and then moving in an ever expanding circle, its devastation affecting more and more people as it moves away.

How are people supposed to accept their own mediocrity, going to work everyday, living for the weekend, surviving until a holiday, all the while hoping that death doesn't find them, that their family will be okay? It's the sick lotto that we play and all eventually lose.

When the light went out of her eyes the darkness entered his, her skeletal body had already wasted away but her mind had fought on, fighting her looming demise and the unknown. How he wished to go there with her too, so she wouldn't be alone, so her hand would always know his, in life and in death.

He wished upon every star and plane in the night sky that it could be him. He would wither and die like a plucked flower, if only any God would let him, but it didn't happen. Instead he took away the only love he knew, plunging him into singularity.

He had watched as her grey pallor became more pronounced in death. Her brittle nails chewed to the quick. It was cruel and unfeeling to let people become like this, to let a slow, crippling and vicious death ruin a once vibrant being.

He knew first hand, he had felt it; emotion can catch in your throat choking you while your stomach churns a stormy sea in your stomach. Then it hits again, anger and despair washing over you, drenching your entire essence in sadness.

Then comes the bargaining, oh he is even further acquainted with it now, their wanting one more year, one more moment, and one more second. The magic of fairytales, the lies of happy endings, they don't exist and if you somehow manage to obtain one... you have no capacity to appreciate it. It's why people need to be reminded of how easily it can be snatched away.

She fought for him for over three years as it cut through her body, at first in her breast; twisted how it had fed him, kept him alive in his first months on this planet, only to help to kill her in the end.

Then it spread to her neck, and finally her liver, she had turned all the colours of the rainbow through her illness, a perverse spectrum of beauty, while her natural one faded; it humiliated her at every step.

It was horrendous watching her fight inevitability. She had tried, through it all she tried so hard. She kept a smile on her face as her hair fell out, continued singing despite barely being able to climb the stairs without wheezing... all for him.

It s remarkable how you don't appreciate the simple things like taking a breath until it becomes a struggle to do so. Seeing the concentration, crease her once supple skin as she forced air in and out enraptured him. Watching as her hand clutched to her chest as sheer force of will stamped down the pain.

It had stuck with him, that sight, watching and wondering would this breath be the last, it fascinated him, the idea that it can suddenly stop, and later that he could be the one to make it.

She was young, barely through a third of her lifespan, too young to shuffle through her day, with a relentless tiredness sapping her strength, her vigour. Now unable to lift her feet from gravity's spitefully clutching grasp.

Despite all this, she had still made him breakfast; pancakes with chocolate chip faces, eggs sunny side up. She started giving him smiley faced potatoes to lift his mood, to try to keep his spirits up, as if a mockingly cheerful food could change what was happening.

It hadn't, instead it had merely shown him that putting a smiley face on dying could never heed its relentless call. He liked the irony though.

In the end he saw it all for what it was, death was a release, and by means of the grief of loss we could sincerely appreciate laughter and joy. Without pain we don't know elation, like a sunny day after a week of rain.

He had had to put down his dog a year before, by chance for the same reason. Quick yet painless. The dog looked at him as if to ask why as the needle pierced his skin, becoming limp and heavy in his final moments yet his eyes lever left his. In hindsight he wished he could have left it live longer, had the dog been in as much pain as she in his final moments, well then he would have been a grateful not confused.

The dog needed to feel torture to realise the joy of being freed from it. It was the same with the mass populace; if their lives go untouched then they can never understand that death is cathartic and how their fleeting lives must be revered.

He thought back to that fateful day, too young to know what to do he was pushed from the room, deaths pungent cologne, wrapping around his small frame. She was gone and he was lost. He had no ties now, but he knew what love was; now it had been taken away so he held back his tears turning away from her for that last time.

He watched as others milled around him, smiling, laughing, and living. Why should he feel this way while others get to exist in a false state of blissful oblivion?

He was reborn in that moment, he can remember rising above the agony, learning his purpose.

He was not going to wait for the hand of their almighty god to smite them; he will be a God too. As he was touched by death, he will become it, taking from others what was ripped away from him.

He swears in that second that he will make the world feel the pain that colours his soul and the knowledge that comes with it. He knows love through loss and so shall they. His emotion coils around his psyche, a vibrant red pumping through his veins playing a rhythmic beat inside his head.

He smiles and slips away, invisible as always.


	2. Everyday Heroes

**Authors note: I'm not getting on the site much and am so far behind on stores and everything else that I probably should not be starting new ideas but what the hell here I am. **

**The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example. **

**-Benjamin Disraeli **

**Disclaimer: Oh to have anything of value would be nice but the only thing I own is my credit card debt.**

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Everyday heroes:

The call had come earlier in the week, a courtesy from a long forgotten acquaintance with a simple 'by the way'... an 'in case you'd want to know'. She had of course planned to be there, before yet another scheme and the usual token dress down.

It was too late now; the sun had started to slowly sink into the river, the hour was late. Lisbon thought back on what had shifted in her life, and looked, really for the first time in a while, around her office. She placed so much meaning on what was essentially a small glass rectangle that separated her from her subordinates. It was meant to be a space that defined her as special, as more, but she no longer felt that way and hadn't for a long time.

She was loosing her feeling of purpose and then this. She grabbed her stuff knowing that while inherently late she would at least give the man the consideration of being there just as he was for her.

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The day had finally settled into dusk as Lisbon trudged up the sodden hill. A rare storm had wet the earth, so the sound of her footsteps squelching was her only companion. The breeze whipped loose tendrils around her face and she pushed them back, annoyed by their rebellious nature.

Her vanity had certainly increased over the years, 20 years ago when she was a rookie, a bun and a lick of mascara was all she deemed necessary. Yet that was before Jane had joined her team. There is only so many times when, while standing next to him, a woman can be sized up by others before even the most nonchalant female starts to become paranoid.

She cursed loudly at her train of thinking before remembering where she was. Damn man constantly invading her thoughts and her life. She sighs out into the wind, letting it remove her frustration.

She is not here for him. This is not about him.

She halts in front of the newly dug grave. Etched on the cool grey marble in harsh black, capital letters proudly state that Sergeant Blake, husband, father and friend has entered his final resting place.

Below that there is also a quote. "The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example."

Letting her fingers trace the letters on the stone, Lisbon's tip follows the outline of the word hero in the indentations. That's what he was, that was who he was. He didn't change the whole world but he sure as hell impacted hers and no doubts many others.

Many of the cops she knows want accolades and notoriety but fame is fleeting. Simple, kind and dedicated men like Rob Blake were a rarity and a blessing and their good name and deeds live on. They do good for the sake of it, help for no other reason than someone needs it. That is who she wants to be, he is her champion.

She presumes that to most, the assumption that her mother's death and the perpetrators subsequent release was the reason for her career choice but it was as far from the truth as you could get. She was only 12 when that occurred, the devastation was memorable but everything else is pretty foggy, nor was it her fathers influence... well not directly.

She was 17 when she met the then beat cop Blake. She was working the 9 till 2 shift most nights at a dive diner while simultaneously juggling school, three children, her abusive father and Greg; all in all she was flailing.

Blake did what no one else had done in five years; he listened to her without expectations and demands.

Most nights he came in with his smart mouthed partner and ordered waffles and coffee. He was warm and caring, his wizened eyes cataloguing her injuries but never forcing a confrontation instead simply being there. He would chat, ask her opinion on cases, and tell stories about how it should be... how life could be. He made her feel worthy and that in itself was a rare gift.

The night she decided she wanted to be just like him had begun like every other with a few stragglers wasting away the late hours in the company of strangers. Lisbon was tidying and cleaning in hopes of getting home early.

She was tired; nothing new but she had had an exam and had two more the next day. She was getting ready to close up and go home when a strung out teen came in, nervously scanning the area. While he had no visible tattoos, his wife beater was grungy and he reeked of alcohol. He was probably only a year or two older than she was, it sadden her when she saw people who had lost their way.

He approached two girls nestled in the oversized booths. The hairs on Lisbon's neck bristled in anticipation; sure he was not too tall but he had a rabid dog look, the kind that screams danger.

Despite being strung out he moved speedily over to a cute blonde sitting with another girl. He grabbed the girl and put a knife to her throat. His blood shot eyes darted back and forth unfocused and wild... His yells sounded almost like he was wounded; unintelligible and screeching.

Lisbon had known fear, she felt it daily but seeing that girl, with her cornflower blue eyes streaming and that boy desperate and crazed, she felt true terror. She was helpless, unsure and powerless, she didn't know how to help and she hated that.

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Blake slowly got up gently pushing Lisbon behind him, making himself her human shield. He approached the boy and began to calmly and reassuringly talk him down.

Despite his bulk and obvious career choice, he came close to the boy with ease and a quiet confidence. It was almost like he was a different person; the loud guffaw and booming voice disappeared replaced by soothing tones and friendly words. He was strong yet vulnerable.

Lisbon watched on from the relative safety of the booth. She saw the hostage slow her breathing down, her hysteria gone as Blake's mere presence gave her comfort. The young man too, despite whatever narcotic was whooshing through his system also became entranced by this man, this cop.

It was amazing and awe inspiring and it was the first time Lisbon had seen that true power is not snatched from others by a heavy hand and that a real man does not use violence to gain respect. She always felt drawn to helping people but in that moment she knew that she could do this... that she wanted to do this.

She only worked at the diner for three more months but every night she picked Blake's brain about becoming a cop and to his credit he answered every question and even on occasion brought her literature despite no doubt thinking this slip of a girl had no chance as a rookie.

She smiled to herself at the memories. He was a good man and the world was a lesser place without him in it. Dusk was no more and the night chill made her shiver. Noting the cold that was now seeping into her bones she moved to leave, turning back on a whim she called out into the night.

"Thank you... For saving my life."


End file.
